This article from REALTOR.com Magazine is a bit disturbing when you read that people who owned vacation properties were coming to their abodes and finding strangers living in the houses. It seems a supposed real estate agent (yet to hear if it was verified) and his assistant were renting out people’s places without their knowledge utilizing the well known Craigslist to advertise the openings. I’m wondering if the agent was the guy who sold the properties to these owners to begin with and this is perhaps how someone knew for certain that these were only part-time homes for the owners.
A lot of people buy 2nd homes but don’t always have a method of checking in on their place while they are away. Case in point, a good way to put in a monitor came from Eric Aasness (one of our co-contributers) who has some cabins out on Hood Canal that he ended up having to put remote cameras on when he and his wife noticed that some of their wine and food was going missing. Seems they had an errant plumber on their hands – they dubbed him “the hot tub bandit.”
Perhaps remote property management – even if a stepped down version of what rental property management people handle – is a line of business someone could take up and do well in markets where lots of 2nd homes exist? Especially if there is no rental pool or short term rental aspect to handle.
